Interactive television is a goal to which many companies within both the entertainment industry and the computer and software industry have devoted much resources and effort. Interactive television generally refers to two-way communications between the TV viewer and one or more service providers. Although various experiments have taken place since the 1990s, interactive TV has yet to reach mass-market status. One early prior art application of interactive TV on a widescale basis is pay TV. A form of this known as Near Video on Demand dedicates an entire channel to the same movie (e.g., shown repetitively) so that the viewer can begin to watch it with reasonably short notice. For example, using a remote control, a user is able to choose a movie to watch, pay for the movie, and begin watching it within an hour or so. The user' interaction is basically choosing which movie to watch.
To implement true interactive television, the presentation of meaningful, interactive and dynamic information and data, providing meaningful and interesting interactive choices to the user, together with traditional television video is desired. In this context, dynamic information and data implies data that is up-to-date, accurate and which changes frequently over time to be of continual interest to the user. Interactive information implies that the user is able to select which items of information to view and/or to respond to or transact with the provider of that information. Example of such data includes news, sports scores, commodity prices, information presented accurately in context of the video and audio broadcasted as a television channel, such as the current product being demonstrated on a home shopping channel, the current question being posed on a game show or options to respond to the current audio-visual commercial being broadcast. Examples of responding and transacting include requesting a brochure on the goods or services presented during a commercial break or to place an order for a product demonstrated on a home shopping channel.
Several proprietary solutions have emerged which provide tools to enable creative designers to create compelling interactive services. The authoring tools provided enable creative designers to produce interactive applications which present data as well as rich media such as high quality video, audio and images.
However, prior art interactive television service creation schemes, such as the various proprietary schemes, suffer from a number of limitations. One such limitation is the fact that business data or other forms of interactive and dynamic data is not easily presented or accessible to users in their homes. This is because the service creation tools of prior art interactive television service creation schemes do not provide the capabilities of an easy-to-use authoring tool whilst allowing business data or other forms of interactive and dynamic data to be updated without manual intervention by the author of the service every time an element of data changes.
Users have become accustomed to rich interactive, and highly dynamic, Web pages, as most users are very familiar with surfing the content of the Internet. Users in many parts of the world have also become accustomed to dynamic Teletext pages containing textual content accessible through their televisions. Prior art interactive television service creation schemes are not able to provide similar types of business data and other interactive and dynamic forms of data as that provided over the Internet or through Teletext. Although the emergence of digital television can provide a means for correcting many of these prior art problems, there currently exists no easy mechanism for the presentation of, and efficient access to, business data and other forms of interactive and dynamic data over a digital television network.
An additional problem is the fact that a typical digital television system uses a “set-top box” receiver for interfacing a user's television set with the digital transmission media (e.g., the satellite dish, the cable, etc.). The set-top boxes are typically a receiver having an embedded processor and one or more tuner components for receiving the digital transmission stream and translating it into a suitable video signal. The video signal is coupled to the standardized inputs of the user's television. The computer resources of a typical set-top box is limited in comparison to the computer resources of a typical desktop computer system. These resource limitations are problematic in providing the rich digital content (e.g., dynamic Web pages, etc.) to which users have become accustomed.
Thus, what is required is a solution for providing easy authoring, updating, presentation of and efficient access to interactive and dynamic business data over a digital TV network. Additionally, the required solution should be compatible with the limited computer resources of a typical set-top box. The present invention provides a novel solution to these requirements.